Launching a Financing Startup
When Wayflyer planned its launch in 2019, the leadership team put customers at the center of its operations.
“We take the customer relationship seriously,” says Stephen Duke, Director of Marketing at Wayflyer. “It’s always been really important to us.”
The company realized that one way to facilitate strong customer relationships is with a CRM platform that would serve as a central source of truth for all customer information and interactions.
“Having one source of truth for customers helps you understand where each one is at so you can serve them all better,” says Stephen.
Having an all-in-one CRM solution that’s easy-to-use and maintain would also enable Wayflyer to put its attention on customers instead of technology.
Stephen explains: “When you’re growing, you don’t want to spend your time on a complicated tech stack, managing loads of different solutions. You want something that brings everything together and allows teams to perform sales, marketing and service efficiently.”
Need for scalability
The Wayflyer team also wanted a CRM platform that could scale as the company grew. Even though the company launched with just a handful of people, the founders had big plans from the very beginning.
“We didn’t want to have to change our tech stack in a few months when our business took off,” says Stephen. “We wanted to keep our focus on value-added activities instead of planning and implementing a new CRM.”
Choosing the HubSpot CRM Platform
The Wayflyer team considered their options and ultimately enrolled in the HubSpot for Startups Series A program through one of its investors, Speedinvest, implementing Sales Hub and Marketing Hub.
The team chose the platform for its affordability and ease of use.
Stephen explains: “HubSpot has a great entry package for companies that are young and still working things out. It’s also easy to use and not super complex to get started.”
Just as importantly, the team liked the HubSpot CRM Platform’s ability to scale.
“We could literally add hundreds of team members and thousands of customers without needing to change our CRM,” says Stephen.
The HubSpot CRM Platform also put sales and marketing on the same platform, giving teams access to the same customer data—which facilitated smooth customer handoffs and greater collaboration among teams.
Growing With the HubSpot CRM Platform
Today, Wayflyer’s 120-person global sales team uses the HubSpot CRM Platform for prospecting and managing deals. The marketing team uses it for everything from email campaigns to lead capture forms to nurturing sequences.
Meanwhile, the customer service team uses it to monitor and respond to customer tickets and provide live chat support via the HubSpot CRM’s combined inbox.
Cross-team collaboration
With sales, marketing, and customer service on the same platform, teams can easily collaborate and seamlessly hand off customers.
Stephen notes that this collaboration is especially important when sales hands a customer to the customer success team.
“The customer success team has the full context of who the customer is, what they’ve signed up for, and what the previous conversations have been,” says Stephen.
This seamless collaboration among teams is one reason why customers rate Wayflyer so highly.
“Customers don’t have to repeat themselves with every customer success rep they talk to. We already know them and what’s important to them,” says Stephen.
Collaboration with legal and finance
The HubSpot CRM Platform also facilitates collaboration among Wayflyer’s sales, legal, and finance teams, which is particularly important for its business.
Wayflyer provides funding to eCommerce companies. As part of the approval process, Wayflyer analyzes the performance of the companies that apply.
The HubSpot CRM Platform facilitates this analysis by making it easy for the sales team to collaborate with the underwriting and legal teams.
The teams even use the HubSpot CRM Platform to automate parts of the process, including automatically issuing requests for information to applicants as the deal moves through each stage of the approval process.
50+ integrations
Stephen and his team are also taking full advantage of the many app integrations available for the HubSpot CRM platform.
At last count, they’ve integrated the platform with over 50 solutions.
Most notably, they’ve integrated HubSpot CRM with Slack to automatically notify teams when deals hit specific stages and their input is required.
Additionally, Stephen and his team have integrated the HubSpot CRM Platform with Wayflyer’s proprietary web app.
“Having just one source of truth is great,” says Stephen. “Being able to seamlessly pass that information through to other tools is even better.”
Reporting
Wayflyer has also purchased a HubSpot reporting add-on that combines marketing and sales reports into one user interface.
“We’re able to monitor and report on everything from business development to sales to marketing to customer retention,” says Stephen. “And it’s all done through HubSpot.”
Personalized customer experiences
Stephen is also impressed with the HubSpot CRM Platform’s ability to not just deliver personalized experiences to its customers but to maintain the strong personal relationships that have been Wayflyer’s hallmark from the beginning.
He explains: “HubSpot makes it easy for us to build real relationships with our customers because sales, marketing, and customer service all have complete information at their fingertips. Our customers feel like we’re truly partnering with them to help them grow—which we are.”
Easy scalability
Today, Wayflyer has grown a lot from its early days, and HubSpot has scaled right along with it.
Stephen believes this scalability has allowed Wayflyer to keep its focus where it belongs: on its customers and products.
“HubSpot has allowed us to scale efficiently and focus on improving our products and creating better customer experiences,” says Stephen.
900% Growth in One Year
From 2020 to 2021, Wayflyer grew 900%, signing up thousands of customers and expanding its employee count to 270.
Most impressively, it managed to scale at this rapid pace while also maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction, with 98% willing to recommend Wayflyer to a friend or colleague.
To date, Wayflyer has received $230 million in secured funding. The most recent funding of $150 million established Wayflyer as Ireland’s sixth home-grown tech unicorn.
With all of this success, Stephen is excited to see what the future will bring.
“We’ve been able to make it this far with HubSpot, and I see that continuing,” says Stephen. “They’re basically clearing the path for us as we grow.”
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